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The Gist
- Why we did it. Sifting through hundreds of chatbot providers can be overwhelming, but by compiling a Top 10 list based on high reviews from multiple sites, we’ve made it easier to identify the best chatbot platforms for both enterprise and small business clients.
- Finding the right provider. Building a functional conversational AI chatbot requires foundational language training, business knowledge and the ability to understand user input, making it difficult to find the right provider.
- How we did it. To create our Top 10 list, we used multiple review sites and cross-referenced with chatbot provider lists from various sources, ultimately selecting companies with at least 4.0 stars and 100 reviews or more.
If you’re finding it difficult to choose a chatbot platform, you’re not alone. We understand that sifting through hundreds of options to determine the top choices can be overwhelming. In the process of compiling our Top 10 list, we recognized the challenge and put in the effort to identify the best chatbot providers for you.
Why off-the-Shelf Chatbot Platforms May Not Fit Your Needs
The problem starts with trying to categorize chatbot providers into neat hierarchies based on quantifiable criteria such as an industry they serve or a type of interaction they support. This is because chatbots all use similar tech and serve a similar function: to help a human do something without having to either a) do it themselves (e.g., finding the answer to a question or turning on the lights using Amazon’s Alexa) or b) talk to another human.
Also, all chatbots require some customization to work, said Tanvir Khan, chief digital officer at NTT DATA. “It is not realistic for most enterprises to simply purchase an ‘off-the-shelf’ chatbot and implement it as-is,” he said. “There does need to be a certain amount of customization to make it fit a certain organization’s specific needs.”
Navigating Chatbot Customization and Functionality
Even if the chatbot is doing nothing but supplying simple responses to simple queries such as “What time do you open?” the chatbot will still require your organization to provide those answers. While pre-trained, industry-specific chatbots do exist, many chatbot providers have offerings covering multiple industries and levels of functionality. Choosing the “best” provider for your needs gets complicated fast.
If an organization’s needs are straightforward, off-the-shelf chatbot platforms work fine as a starting point, Khan said. But building a high-functioning conversational AI chatbot requires a lot of foundational language training, domain ontology, business knowledge, artificial intelligence and ability to understand users’ inputs using natural language processing and understanding, he said.
And there are the providers themselves. Some companies are just developers that build chatbots using a chatbot platform provider’s technologies. Many providers offer a chatbot as part of a much larger set of integrated marketing and lead-generation services.
Related Article: Do Chatbots Get Us Any Closer to Human-Level Artificial Intelligence?
Making the Chatbot Cut: How We Made Our List
To create this list, we looked for companies that showed up on at least one review site and favored those that appeared on multiple sites. The review sites we used were Capterra, G2 Crowd and TrustRadius. We searched each site using multiple terms including “chatbot,” “chatbot provider,” “chatbot developer” and “chatbot platform.”
To narrow the results, only companies with 4.0 stars and above at least 100 reviews were selected. To further stratify this list we cross-referenced it with chatbot platform lists from AIM, Helpjuice, Chatbots.org and 99signals. Firms that appeared on one or more of these lists got preference over firms that did not. That got us to the Top 10 list you see below, which was ordered based on the total number of reviews from all three review sites combined.
Related Article: 6 Ways ChatGPT May Change Digital Customer Experience
Top 10 Highest-Rated Chatbot Platforms in 2023
- Intercom: Award-Winner in Live Chat
- Birdeye: Best Chatbot Platform for Small Businesses
- Appy Pie: Best ChatGPT-Powered AI Chatbot
- Tidio: Best Chatbot Platform With a Free Tier
- Drift: Award-Winner in Analytics and AI Products
- Freshchat: Award-Winner in Live Chat, Customer Success
- IBM Watson Assistant: Named 1 of 10 Best Softwares in 2022
- Landbot: Best Chatbot Platform for Enterprise Brands
- Mobile Monkey: Best AI Chatbot Platform for Mobile
- TARS: Best Low-Code AI Chatbot Provider
Intercom provides customer service teams from more than 25,000 global organizations, including Atlassian, Amazon and Lyft Business, with the ability to create personalized customer experiences using a low-code chatbot development platform.
Marquee customers: Amazon, Meta, Atlassian, Microsoft, Amplitude
Pricing: Based on seats and number of unique people reach per month
Awards: 2023 TrustRadius Best of — Live Chat category
Reviews (from Capterra):
Positive:
- “Generally Intercom is a very good professional product. They have good support, good training materials and they are always releasing new features.”
- “The product once you get past the setting up and figure out everything on your own, is great and meets our needs. It’s easy to chat with leads and customers and easy to install on any website.”
- “I liked how easy Intercom was to install, without needing Engineering help beyond the time it took to insert the widget. I can update the user experience to A/B test all through the application.”
Negative:
- “There is no API call to “archive the segment” despite that it was proposed a few years ago. Intercom offers one of the worst client libraries on the whole Github and they reject PR’s.”
- “Also, a lot of Ad block tools catch Intercom as an ad and blocks it — thus creating inconvenience for end users having to choose between.”
- “Customer service is terrible and they just don’t give two hoots about their customers. Constantly introducing new features but not actually fixing the main feature that someone would need.”
Birdeye is a customer experience platform provider that deploys a suite of tools designed to help small businesses collect, manage and analyze customer feedback, as well as to generate insights that can be used to improve customer service, increase sales and improve efficiency.
Birdeye offers automated surveys, reviews and reputation management, helping businesses to build a positive image on social media and review sites. Additionally, Birdeye provides customer engagement and marketing automation tools including chatbots, to help businesses nurture relationships with their customers and drive more sales.
Marquee customers: Bekins Moving, RingCentral, Aspen Dental
Pricing: $299 per month and up
Awards: 2022 Capterra Shortlist — Multiple categories, 2022 TrustRadius Best of — Multiple categories
Reviews (from Capterra):
Positive:
- “Experience has been great and support is super helpful. We will continue for a long time with BirdEye.”
- “I love the convenience of having your big players all in one spot. Ease of reading and responding to reviews.”
- “It has helped us tremendously in gaining feedback from our customers as to how satisfied they are with our services and to enlighten us as to ways we may improve our services moving forward.”
Negative:
- “Sometimes old correspondence will pop up in our ‘Open’ inbox and I’m not sure why that is. It could be user error, but IDK.”
- “The customer support is one of the worst that we have ever dealt with.”
Appy Pie is low-code/no-code application, workflow automation and chatbot development platform provider powered by ChatGPT-3. Appy Pie’s chatbot builder is a no-code chatbot building platform that enables organizations to create chatbots similar to ChatGPT. The platform comes with pre-built templates that make it really easy for you to make your own AI chatbot in just a few minutes.
Appy Pie also provides third-party integrations with services such as Zoho CRM, Zendesk, Slack and Facebook Messenger. The chatbot builder also comes with an analytics dashboard for bot performance. The company also offers a range of services such as app marketing and support.
Marquee clients: None listed
Pricing: $9 per bot, per month and up
Awards: 2022 Capterra Shortlist – Multiple categories
Reviews (from Capterra):
Positive:
- “I like everything … and the staff was wonderful at helping me with all my questions and overall.”
- “It is not that expensive, the design is beautiful and easy to edit, it has many very good plugins, and the customer service is excellent.”
- “When you have a team of people dedicated to help you move forward then the outcome is bound to be good.”
Negative:
- “However, the [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] then came in and cleaned a lot up. The 10-30 Resubmissions did piss me off … Also, no phone support once you purchase.”
- “Every time it seeks for feedback, it’s irritating.”
Tidio is an AI-powered customer service platform that offers a range of features, including automated customer engagement, live customer support, analytics, smart customer segmentation, advanced analytics and chatbot technology for a customer service bot or other custom bots.
Marquee clients: None listed
Pricing: $33 per user, per month
Awards: 2023 Capterra Short List — Multiple Categories, 2023 G2 Crowd — Best Est. ROI Mid-Market
Reviews (from Capterra):
Positive:
- “It has been a great experience to interact with my clients.”
- “The free level is excellent and a smart way to get folks in the door and provides good basic services including, most importantly to me, chat bot.”
- “The support is excellent, the service is excellent and I loved it.”
Negative:
- “Will tell after few time more but I have a problem to contact direct with people due to timing.”
- “The pricing for extra users is really the bad aspect of this tool.”
Drift is a chatbot company that provides conversational marketing and sales technology. It uses automated messages, automated emails and live chat to help more than 50,000 businesses engage with their customers. It also provides analytics data insights to help organizations understand how customers are interacting with their product or service.
Marquee clients: State Street Global Advisors, SAP Concur, ProofPoint, Okta
Pricing: $2,500 annually and up
Awards: 2023 G2 Crowd — Top 50 Analytics & AI Products
Reviews (from Capterra):
Positive:
- “Great communication interaction with prospects.”
- “Drift also makes the chats very personalized and fun to interact with. That feeling gives our prospects a sense of comfort when they visit our site.”
- “Honestly, it’s the best software out there for that purpose. It’s east to implement and start using, the results are coming fast and everything is measurable….”
Negative:
- “Drift has a couple key problems — one being the overly simplistic and confusing backend UI.”
- “So after losing a month+ in the process, Drift accepted to cancel the subscription BUT still charged us and refused to refund the initial month.”
Freshchat offers AI-powered customer messaging chatbots across various channels like WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, Facebook Messenger, website, mobile app and others. Organizations use Freshchat to create automated workflows and use AI-driven insights to optimize customer experience. Freshchat also integrates with other customer service tools, such as Salesforce and Zendesk to provide a unified customer experience.
Marquee clients: Klarna, Blue Nile, Harvey Norman, Dunzo
Pricing: $15 per agent, per month and up, Free plan available
Awards: 2022 TrustRadius Best of — Multiple categories
Reviews (from Capterra):
Positive:
- “I loved the fact that you could have live conversations with customers or visitors to my website. This way it is easier to make them buy a service before they leave.”
- “And they do … and we respond from the very friendly and easy dashboard for us. Also it has a free version, which fits our needs for now, which is great.”
Negative:
- “I am highly disappointed in the Freddy chatbot. It was supposed to their best chatbot but I was extremely disappointed with it.”
- “However, occasionally, the human sales associates aren’t knowledgeable, tired of answering questions, therefore rude and careless or have to ask another associate.”
- “Sometimes I forget to check the messages and I miss a lot of chat queries because of not receiving desktop notifications for new chat messages. I check emails less often.”
IBM Watson Assistant is a conversational artificial intelligence platform designed to improve traditional support functions through AI-powered virtual agents and AI-powered chatbots. Watson Assistant can be used to automate processes like order taking, scheduling appointments and customer onboarding. It also integrates with CRM and other back-end systems to create customer self-service and track progress across the buyer’s journey.
Marquee clients: None listed
Pricing: $140 per month and up, Free option is available
Awards: 2023 G2 Crowd Leader, 2022 TrustRadius Top Rated — Multiple categories
Reviews (from TrustRadius):
Positive:
- “It performs NLP very well and this permits it to be utilized for a scope of undertakings, for example, client care, information investigation, and, surprisingly, authoritative record analysis.”
- “It has the ability to create and manage virtual agents very easily and in a short period of time.”
- “Provides detailed information on interactions between chatbot and users.”
Negative:
- “Its NLP abilities could be improved to all the more likely distinguish and break down the feeling of discussions.”
- “With this platform it is possible to create very efficient virtual assistants, although I consider that its user interface has much room for improvement.”
- “This platform meets all our requirements, the only negative aspect is its price.”
Landbot offers a low-code, AI-powered chatbot building platform to create conversational experiences for websites, mobile apps and messaging services. It can also be used to create automated workflows using a combination of AI and natural language processing. Landbot also offers analytics support.
Marquee clients: Nestle, The Coca-Cola Company, Allianz, Hotelbeds
Pricing: $39 and up, Free option available
Awards: 2022 G2 Crowd High Performer
Reviews (from Capterra):
Positive:
- “A warm and wonderful experience. Sure I’ll be working with them for long time.”
- “The overall functionality of the bot is great for basic use.”
- “Great and better than competitors. Hope to see AI features in the future to recognize hand-typed requests and answers of users.”
Negative:
- “It does not have a mobile app so it is hard to manage.”
- “Two weeks later I didn’t hear back so I reached out again only to find out that the ticket was in the wrong queue.”
- “The only negative thing I found so far is that if you build a chat bot with a complicated logic and 100+ Dialog blocks even strong PC is experiencing lack of resources.”
Mobile Monkey is a mobile app development platform that enables users to create and deploy iOS and Android mobile apps with ease. It provides features like a drag-and-drop interface, customized UI/UX designs, a built-in analytics platform and more to help users create stunning mobile apps quickly and easily. It also helps users to seamlessly manage their mobile app development process, from design to launch. With its user-friendly interface, users can create an app in minutes and are able to customize, monitor and manage it at all times.
Marquee clients: Toyota, WMware, Century21, Outdoorsy
Pricing: $119 per month and up
Awards: 2023 G2 Crowd Best of Analytics & AI Products
Reviews (from G2 Crowd):
Positive:
- “Great inbound tools like Messengerblast — allowing you to send messages to Facebook fans — Get leads.”
- “The fact that it has more abilities for conversational marketing. The chatbot automation for Facebook and Instagram. Facebook messenger. It has more features compared to other competitors.”
- “MobileMonkey is a lead driver and qualifier for our sales team. Basically it is a simple way to automate the new customer intake process in a chat on our website, Facebook and Instagram.”
Negative:
- “I wish there were tutorials available with each feature — on the spot, in case I get confused about how to use a new tool.”
- “The software is great. It only needs to improve on other social media platforms for integration. By expanding more to other social platforms. Mobile App user experience.”
- “Most of the platform is easy to use but we played around with the messaging ad formats but ultimately got a little lost in the interface. I heard from our rep that the ads interface may be changing soon.”
TARS is a low-code, conversational AI chatbot platform provider used by marketing and customer service teams to automate their customer service interactions and redefine their customer experience using chatbots.
TARS boasts one of the largest AI chatbot template libraries in the world with more than 2,000 chatbot templates across industries and use cases.
Marquee clients: Vodafone, Daimler, American Express, Bosch
Pricing: $99 per month and up
Awards: 2023 G2 Crowd High Performer
Reviews (from Capterra):
Positive:
- “We also like that they have continually made improvements to the program. Good optimization for mobile users.”
- “Overall, Tars has been useful and has led to some leads for my business.”
- “We have created many great bots with it (some of them have even been featured in TARS emails). We also had the pleasure to meet the guys behind it.”
Negative:
- “Despite everything, it still looks old in terms of design. The ‘branding logo’ placement is also weird.”
- “Unable to print out/export nodes maps. Sometimes hard to see details with lots of node lines on the UX.”
- “The only thing I miss is the fact that they don’t have a 2 way integration with Google Calendar, they need to work on that.”
Choosing the Right AI Chatbot Technology
Choosing the right AI chatbot provider can be a daunting task, but our Top 10 list based on high reviews from multiple sites makes it easier for both enterprise and small business clients to find the best options.
Look into each provider’s capabilities and use cases and ensure you select what you need in a chatbot — like artificial intelligence, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, etc. While off-the-shelf chatbots may seem like a convenient solution, customization is often required to make them fit an organization’s specific needs.
By taking into account multiple review sites and cross-referencing chatbot provider lists, we have identified the top chatbot providers to help you navigate the complexities of AI chatbot customization and functionality.
Learn how you can join our contributor community.
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